Prologue

It was quiet here, the silence pushing up against her body, making it dance in the waves and the underwater waft. She watched the bubbles of light and air float from her mouth, gliding toward the surface, pushing up against the waves, and bursting into the air. There were distant lights, the small bobbing ore of the moon, reflecting in the clear water blue. There were other lights, other colors, some unknown to the surface, unknown to her other self.

Her other self… She distantly remembered laughter and noise, lots of noise, in that unknown part of herself. The other world. Where there were unidentified bangs and loud ripples that hurt her ears.

She could remember a vague image of herself, her human self. It was like gazing at her reflection in the tide pool when the water was low and the moon was high. She was different there, in that loud place. She was someone else, some name that she could not pronounce in the language of the sea.

Her hair was short, and stiff, it did not float and wave like it did now, as she sank into the deep, passing the white bone of the coral. Her marked body, marked with the symbol of her lineage, stained her breasts, her back, and her arms making her an outcast in the world of the land and sky. Here, in the ocean and the deep, she was not an outcaste, but she was alone.

She did not understand her awkward land body, all she knew now was herself, herself unidentified, a mermaid of legend or timeless passing. She was as old as the sea, as old as the earth and all of its bodies of water.

A word came to her then, as she gazed up at the waving bright glare of the full moon. In the surface world, in the world with the sun, she was called something, something she could not identify here.

Monstrosity.

She gazed at her hands and attempted to spread them out, as she so often did as her other self. They were multicolored, her hands, beautiful brilliant aqua colors of blues and greens, oranges and reds, some not even visible to the human eye, so much ocean in just one thing. Yet, something was wrong. Unlike in the land of sky and earth she could not pull her hands apart, the milky fingers giving way with a single command. No, the hand would not spread; the fingers would not glide through the water and touch the ocean with the naked sensation. She had fins, not hands and feet. She did, she remembered that she did, but at this moment she did not. In some other time, between moonset and dawn, when the sun glides upon the water and bathes the ocean in pink and gold, then, only then can she would become her other self.

Right now, in the quite and the deep. Without the noise and companionship of her other life, she was just herself, as old as time itself, yet so young.

Monstrosity. She closed her eyes, and leaned back wanting to fall…fall…into the deep.